As consumer products and services have grown more complex, the need to provide support to consumers purchasing these products and/or services has grown. Traditionally, this support has been provided by live agents over the telephone. A call center is a central location where multiple agents answer telephone calls from consumers looking for support for products and/or services. A business may have several call centers. In addition, a business may hire a company to provide call center services for its customers.
Businesses that wish to maintain a call center evaluate the number of calls that will be handled simultaneously in order to determine the number of agents that must be available. To maintain customer satisfaction, businesses do not want to have customers waiting on hold for extended periods of time. To maintain efficiency, businesses do not want to have agents waiting for calls because maintaining many agents is expensive. Accordingly, it is desirable for a business to increase the number of calls which agents can handle at a call center.
Typically, agents interact with a computer via one or more interfaces to access data which allows the agent to respond to a customer's inquiries. Such computers allow an agent to obtain information about the caller, as well as display dialog to more efficiently service a caller. Such computers may also allow an agent to access other resources of the company to service the caller's requests. However, one source of inefficiency in present call center interfaces is the inability of an agent to access necessary information. The inability to access such information results in delays and inefficiencies. Another problem with present interfaces is the display of unnecessary information which is distracting to an agent. Once again, valuable time is lost to an agent by sifting through unnecessary information.
When creating known interfaces for agents, programmers had to reply on the past positions of data elements and previous interpretations of where information and transactions were placed on the screen space. Since such placement was a byproduct of computer legacy systems which were designed as static display applications, relying on previous placement of data and information does not result in function conveyance of necessary information to a call center agent. Further, since traditional information was largely static, additional resources would have to be accessed up by a call center agent. This further decreases efficiency and requires further training.